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ELLEN DeGeneres may be crying in public over the dog she gave up, but her flack, Kelly Bush, is doing the TV host’s dirty work behind the scenes.

Yesterday on her show, DeGeneres bawled over Iggy, the mutt she adopted a month ago, then passed off to her hairdresser two weeks later, claiming the pup didn’t get along with her cats.

But in handing off the pooch, DeGeneres broke a contract she’d signed with Pasadena-based pet adoption agency Mutts & Moms stipulating she was to return Iggy to the agency if the pet wasn’t a good fit for her and girlfriend Portia de Rossi.

When Mutts & Moms called to check on the dog, DeGeneres told them she had given it away. On Sunday, they went and took Iggy back, leaving the hairdresser’s two kids devastated. DeGeneres begged publicly for them to return it to the family, saying she was an “animal lover” who thought she was doing the right thing.

But Keith Fink, a lawyer for Mutts & Moms, tells Page Six’s Marianne Garvey it’s all an act. Behind the scenes, DeGeneres’ publicist was calling the small agency and threatening it, says Fink, who played a vicious voice-mail message for us:

“This is Kelly Bush. We are filing a legal case against you. We are going to be contacting the media. This is not going to be good for your store or your organization. You did not do the right thing. You need to call back. There is no reason for you to take this dog. Please call back before this gets further out of hand.”

“Ellen’s lying,” said Fink. “She is using her power and her access to the media to destroy this agency in the media. This is a woman who has signed many seven-figure contracts. She knows what she signed.”

According to Fink, after yesterday’s show aired, Ellen’s fans bombarded Mutts & Moms’ owner, Marina Batkis, with threatening calls to “burn her house down.” One fan said, “You slimeball bitches are not worthy of living. How dare you make Ellen cry. Give Iggy back!”

Bush denied making threats. “I have not left any threatening messages at all,” she said. “The agency threatened to go to the media and I said that wouldn’t be a good idea. I told them there’s just no need to escalate this . . . They started this by wanting to take it public. I was the one who said, ‘Let’s talk about this.’ ”